As the Kronos Quartet celebrates its 40th anniversary, Ivan Hewett meets its
founder David Harrington.

For centuries the string quartet was the perfect embodiment of classical decorum. Then along came theKronos Quartet. For 40 years these four string players have created an entirely new string quartet experience, for which “concert” seems a poor word. A Kronos Quartet event might begin in a gloom of dry-ice and coloured lighting, with sounds issuing mysteriously from speakers. Images, sometimes still, sometimes moving, appear on screens. When the four players enter the fray, their notes are hard to distinguish from those already swirling round the hall. And there might be musicians on stage that don’t normally share the stage with a string quartet: Wu Man, virtuoso of the Chinese lute, for example, or the Romanian Gypsy band Taraf de Haïdouks.

The multimedia, multi-ethnic polystylist Kronos experience is now much imitated. Yet its roots lie in something very traditional and absolutely central to the quartet tradition: Beethoven’s late, great quartet in E flat major. “I was a kid learning to play the violin,” recalls David Harrington, the founder of the Kronos Quartet and still its leader 40 years later. “I was interested in all kinds of music, so I signed up in my parent’s name to the Columbia Record Club. They hooked you in by offering six LPs for a dollar, I remember. One of the things I ordered was thatBeethoven quartet, played by the Budapest Quartet. Well, I put that record on the table, and, wow.” He gestures with his long lanky arms, and shakes his head in wonderment at the memory. “The sound of that opening E flat major chord just blew my mind. I knew right there I had to recreate that sound, so I formed a quartet with some friends.”

Although this early attempt at leading a quartet soon dissolved, many more things have blown Harrington’s mind since. With his thatch of blonde hair and lean, tall frame he seems hardly changed from the young man who studied violin in the late Sixties, devoured every record of modernist music he could find, took up an orchestral job in Canada to avoid the draft, and had his first taste of promoting a concert series, at a local museum. Back in the US a few years later, not sure what to do next, he had his second epiphany. This came through a chance encounter with a piece that’s become a classic of its kind, George Crumb’s Black Angels. “This was the first quartet I found that really reinvented the medium. You hear cries and shouts from the players, and all kinds of percussion instruments, and the stringed instruments themselves are played in extraordinary ways. I thought, I just have to play this piece. And that got me thinking about a quartet that would only play music by living composers.”

The decision having been made, things happened fast. In August 1973 Harrington formed the Kronos Quartet, and in October they gave their first concert, at a community college in Seattle. “I’ll never forget it,” he says. “There were nine people, including five of my own family.”

It was a start, but it took years to persuade a sceptical world that a quartet playing only new music was a brilliant idea. “I called every music agent in the book,” says Harrington, “and not one returned my call.” The leading American quartet, the Guarneri, were even less encouraging. “I met their cellist at a party after one of their concerts,” says Harrington. “I told him I was hoping to create a quartet like theirs, but was finding it really tough. ‘Don’t worry kid, you never will,’” he said.”Harrington pauses. “That really pissed me off.”

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But nothing daunted Harrington and he and his colleagues moved to the East Coast for two years for some advanced training. After several changes of personnel the quartet wound up in 1977 in San Francisco, where they’re still based. But a crisis loomed. The day after the quartet was appointed ensemble-in-residence at the prestigious Mills College, two players resigned, “with immediate effect,” Harrington recalls through gritted teeth. The desperate search for replacements led to surprisingly enduring results. The new viola player, Hank Dutt, is still with the quartet today, and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud stayed with the quartet for 20 years.

During the Eighties the rise of the Kronos Quartet to its present superstar status began in earnest, helped along by key encounters, such as the one with great minimalist founding father Terry Riley. “Riley was also at Mills College, and I persuaded him to write a piece for us, even though he’d become an improvising musician and had created no written music for years. Persuading people to do things they’re not sure about is a skill I’ve had to hone,” says Harrington. See below for a performance of Uniko from The Kronos Quartet with Finnish accordianist Kimmo Pohjonen.

He’s clearly become good at it. Riley is now writing his 24th piece for the group, and in all 800 pieces have been written for the Kronos, including many from outside classical music’s normal heartlands. It turns out that this too owes something to a childhood epiphany. “When I was a kid playing quartets I realised four of its greatest composers came from this one city of Vienna. I found it on the globe, and I remember thinking – why don’t we have quartets from all these other countries, in Africa and China and Arabia?” Thanks to the Kronos, we now do. The first African composer to be commissioned was actually the white South African Kevin Volans, whom Harrington met in 1984. The Kronos’s recording of his White Man Sleeps became one of the classical hits of the decade.

The Kronos Quartet is now preparing for a huge 40th anniversary tour, which will involve a dozen pieces. With all this multi-ethnic, multi-media colour now such an important part of the Kronos experience, many say that it has no connection with the quartet tradition as it’s commonly understood. Harrington disagrees. “So many of the new quartets we’ve commissioned have a really clear connection to the great European tradition,” he says. “Think of the Polish composer Henryck Górecki, or the Russian Valentin Silvestrov. We've just opened the medium up to the world, but I still feel the achievement of those great Viennese composers is at the back of what we do.”

The Kronos Quartet appears with Kimmo Pohjonen and Samuli Kosminen at the Barbican Hall on 18 September and on 13 May 2014 as part of their 40th anniversary tour (020 7638 8891/www.barbican.org.uk).